Book picks similar to
I'm Rising: Determined. Confident. Powerful. by Michelle G. Stradford
poetry
poems
black-authors
giveaway-books
This Modern Love
Will Darbyshire - 2016
‘Question 1. What would you say to your ex, without judgement?’Seeking closure after a tough break-up, Will Darbyshire was driven to strike up an intimate conversation with his online audience. Posting a series of questions via his YouTube, Twitter and Instagram channels, Will asked his followers to share their innermost thoughts about their relationship experiences, in the form of hand-written letters, poems, photographs, and emails.After 6 months and over 15,000 heartfelt submissions later, from over 100 countries, This Modern Love collects these letters together to form a compendium of 21st century love, structured into the beginning, middle and end of a relationship.Tender, funny and cathartic, This Modern Love is a compelling portrait of individual desires, resentments and fears that reminds us that, whether we're in or out of love, we're not alone.
Always and Forever
Soraya M. Lane - 2016
They have a dream house and a dream marriage, and very soon they’ll have a dream family too. But life is rarely that simple. When their beautiful life is rocked by tragedy, they are forced to make an unbearable choice. Suddenly the future they’ve built together looks fragile and exposed.With aching hearts and their love on the line, they set off on a road trip through the stunning Californian landscape, hoping that time—and distance from the life they thought perfect—will help them start again. Matt is desperate not to lose Lisa, but as they confront their grief in different ways, he may have lost her already.Where there is love there ought to be strength, but this love has been tested to its limits. Have they endured too much heartbreak for one couple to take? Or will a journey down memory lane put them back on the road to love, hope—and each other?
Nyx in the House of Night: Mythology, Folklore and Religion in the PC and Kristin Cast Vampyre Series
P.C. CastJana Oliver - 2011
It's a place where magic, religion, folklore, and mythology from multiple traditions merry meet and meld to create something incredible and new.In Nyx in the House of Night—a 2-color illustrated companion to the House of Night series—some of your favorite YA authors, plus a few experts, help you navigate the influences behind the House of Night series in a guide that would get even Damien's seal of approval.Travel with P.C. Cast as she gets her first tattoo in Ireland, climbs the ruins of Sgiach's castle, and discovers the lore that led to the Isle of Skye vampyres. Read Kristin Cast's defense of women in history and mythology who, like Zoey, have made a practice of juggling multiple men. Sit in on a vampyre lecture by Bryan Lankford, the real-life basis for House of Night instructor Dragon Lankford, on the parallels between Wiccan and vampyre circle rituals. Tour Tulsa's House of Night landmarks with local Amy H. Sturgis.Plus:•Karen Mahoney on Nyx and other goddesses of the night•John Edgar Browning on vampires in folklore, fiction, and reality•Jana Oliver on tattoos and other Marks•Ellen Steiber on feline familiars•Yasmine Galenorn on priestesses and goddess worship•Jordon Dane on Zoey's Cherokee heritage•Jeri Smith-Ready on the Raven Mockers and Kalona's less than heavenly inspiration•Christine Zika on the connection between Nyx and the Virgin Mary•Triniy Faegen on the Greek version of the OtherworldNyx in the House of Night also includes an appendix of character names that reveals the myth behind Zoey's last name, which House of Night cats have ties to Camelot, Egypt, and Middle-earth, and more!
Stranger Music: Selected Poems and Songs
Leonard Cohen - 1993
Stranger Music presents a magnificent cross-section of Cohen's work--including the legendary songs Suzanne, Sisters of Mercy, Bird on a Wire, Famous Blue Raincoat, I'm Your Man, and The Future; selections from such books as Flowers for Hitler, Beautiful Losers, and Death of a Lady's Man, and eleven previously unpublished poems. This volume demonstrates definitively that Cohen is a writer of dazzling intelligence and a force that transcends genres.
Changing My Wardrobe
Deb Hanrahan - 2011
It's a story about friendship, first love, and soul-crushing loss. It's a story about a person's choices, good and bad, and the unexpected and far-reaching consequences of those choices.Lindsey’s first day of high school is her big chance to start over. With the help of her best friend, Teeny, she begins her transformation by changing her wardrobe. But her longtime nemesis, Avery, likes things just the way they are and sabotages Lindsey at every turn. As the school year progresses, lines are drawn; sides are picked, and war ensues. The escalating drama eventually leads to a tragic event that will alter the teens' lives forever...especially Lindsey’s.
Happiness: Your Route-Map to Inner Joy
Andy Cope - 2017
This funny, practical book by Andy Cope, the Dr of Happiness, will show you how to transform your thinking, change gear and find a fresh new perspective that will leave you better focused on the things that matter, healthier and a great deal happier.ABOUT THIS SERIESLittle Books are accessible and engaging books with a focus on personal development and business topics, delivering quick, outcome-focused results, ideal for self-improvement junkies, commuters, or business readers.
The Wild Iris
Louise Glück - 1992
Winner of the Nobel Prize in LiteratureFrom Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Louise Glück, a stunningly beautiful collection of poems that encompasses the natural, human, and spiritual realmsBound together by the universal themes of time and mortality and with clarity and sureness of craft, Louise Glück's poetry questions, explores, and finally celebrates the ordeal of being alive.
Some of the Dharma
Jack Kerouac - 1997
He began writing it in 1953 as reading notes on Buddhism intended for his friend, poet Allen Ginsberg. As Kerouac's Buddhist study and meditation practice intensified, what had begun as notes evolved into a vast and all-encompassing work of nonfiction into which he poured his life, incorporating poems, haiku, prayers, journal entries, meditations, fragments of letters, ideas about writing, overheard conversations, sketches, blues, and more. The final manuscript, completed in 1956, was as visually complex as the writing: each page was unique, typed in patterns and interlocking shapes. The elaborate form which Kerouac so painstakingly gave the book on his manual typewriter is re-created in this typeset facsimile.
I Am Not Your Final Girl
Claire C. Holland - 2018
Holland, a timely collection of poetry that follows the final girl of slasher cinema - the girl who survives until the end - on a journey of retribution and reclamation. From the white picket fences of 1970s Haddonfield to the apocalyptic end of the world, Holland confronts the role of women in relation to subjects including feminism, violence, motherhood, sexuality, and assault in the world of Trump and the MeToo movement. Each poem centers on a fictional character from horror cinema, and explores the many ways in which women find empowerment through their own perceived monstrousness.
The Places Left Unfilled
M.C. Cauley - 2020
But when her close friendship with an older neighbor begins to attract suspicion, and connecting with her birth father isn’t at all how she imagined it would be, Morgan’s long-held hope begins to dwindle. That is, until, at the age of fourteen, Morgan meets Bill – her forty-five-year-old martial arts instructor.At first a teacher and father figure who Morgan can confide in, Bill soon reveals that his interest in her isn’t entirely paternal. Despite her initial fear, Morgan craves the attention Bill is more than willing to lavish upon her, resulting in a several-months-long affair that will alter the course of both of their lives.Spanning four years of Cauley’s adolescence, The Places Left Unfilled explores in harrowing detail the circumstances that may lead a child to find solace in their sexual abuse. Told with immediacy and remarkable candor, Cauley’s gripping narrative will stay with you long after you’ve turned the final page.
The Essential Gwendolyn Brooks
Gwendolyn Brooks - 2005
There was material always, walking or running, fighting or screaming or singing." From the life of Chicago's South Side she made a forceful and passionate poetry that fused Modernist aesthetics with African-American cultural tradition, a poetry that registered the life of the streets and the upheavals of the 20th century. Starting with A Street in Bronzeville (1945), her epoch-making debut volume, The Essential Gwendolyn Brooks traces the full arc of her career in all its ambitious scope and unexpected stylistic shifts."Her formal range," writes editor Elizabeth Alexander, "is most impressive, as she experiments with sonnets, ballads, spirituals, blues, full and off-rhymes. She is nothing short of a technical virtuoso." That technical virtuosity was matched by a restless curiosity about the life around her in all its explosive variety. By turns compassionate, angry, satiric, and psychologically penetrating, Gwendolyn Brooks's poetry retains its power to move and surprise.
Africa's Child
Maria Nhambu - 2016
Above all, as a very young child she decided one day that even if there was no other person in the world who loved and wanted her, she was going to love and care for herself—and that decision changed the course of her life. Africa’s Child is the story of a mixed-race girl growing up in the Usambara Mountains of Tanzania, East Africa. Raised in an orphanage with no knowledge of her origins or family, she endured abandonment, hardships, severe illnesses, and bullying. Her experiences as a child and teenager included physical, emotional, and sexual abuse, social stigma, and racial discrimination.Yet Nhambu tells her inspiring story with warmth and humor. Her questioning mind probes the African tribal realities and multi-cultural complexities that impacted her life both at the orphanage and schools run by German nuns as well as at an African high school with American nuns. Nhambu not only survived her childhood but triumphed. Her faith and resilience, along with a belief in learning and her tenacious pursuit of an education, sustained her through many challenges. Dance, especially African tribal dance, became the way she healed and nourished her spirit. Through the love and commitment of an American teacher she met in Africa, Nhambu was able to pursue her dream of education and a new life for herself. The first book in her three-part memoir ends as she is leaving Africa for university studies in America on a full scholarship.Maria Nhambu is the creator of Aerobics With Soul®, a fitness workout based on African dance.
Ultraviolet
Suzanne Matson - 2018
Returning to the American Midwest as a teenager, Kathryn feels alienated and restless. When she loses her mother prematurely to a stroke, she escapes to Oregon for a fresh start. Wanting to continue her education and become a writer, she supports herself as a waitress in wartime America, dating soldiers, then meeting and marrying Finnish-American Carl. A construction worker sixteen years her senior, he is an unlikely match, though appealing in his carefree ways and stark difference from her Mennonite past. But Kathryn ends up feeling trapped in the marriage, her ambitions thwarted. Samantha, who’s grown up in the atmosphere of her mother’s discontent, follows her own career to teach at a university in faraway Boston and maintains a happy family of her own.When Kathryn starts to fail, Samantha moves her mother near her to care for, and then to watch over her deathbed, where “something in the room—the spell, the cord knitting them together—is cut. Or no, that can’t be right, either.” Ultraviolet is a lyrical novel of great emotional depth. Suzanne Matson recognizes both the drama that is within every existence and the strengths and fragilities of our relationships with others. She shines a brilliant light on the complexities of marriage, motherhood, aging, and the end of life.
For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide / When the Rainbow Is Enuf
Ntozake ShangeNtozake Shange - 1975
Brown.From its inception in California in 1974 to its Broadway revival in 2022, the Obie Award–winning for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf has excited, inspired, and transformed audiences all over the country for nearly fifty years. Passionate and fearless, Shange’s words reveal what it meant to be a woman of color in the 20th century. First published in 1975, when it was praised by The New Yorker for “encompassing…every feeling and experience a woman has ever had,” for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf will be read and performed for generations to come. Now with new introductions by Jesmyn Ward and Broadway director Camille A. Brown, and one poem not included in the original, here is the complete text of a groundbreaking dramatic prose poem that resonates with unusual beauty in its fierce message to the world.
eighteen years
Madisen Kuhn - 2015
It is meant to be curled up with at night, accompanied by a cup of tea. It's a hug in book-form. It is there to comfort you when fuzzy socks and ice cream just aren't enough. It will inspire you to pick up a pen and write down thoughts of your own. It will help you to say the words that feel stuck in your chest. Take it on the train. Take it to the beach. Keep it on your nightstand. Keep it in your backpack. Read it at the park on benches beneath hundred-year-old trees. Read it while it's raining. Read it when you're happy. Read it when your heart aches. Eighteen Years is meant to be bent and worn, written in, tear-stained, and loved. This book is for you.